Crested ‘beach bum’ dinosaur found in Mexico

Washington: Seventy-two million years ago, a dinosaur with a sail-shaped crest on the top of its head lived at a Mexican seashore, munching plants and trying to avoid a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex.

US, Mexican and Canadian scientists on Tuesday announced the discovery of Velafrons Coahuilensis, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 7 million years before a big rock from space wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures.

Its fossil was found in the rugged, dry terrain of north-central Mexico’s Coahuila state.

“Velafrons was probably a beach bum,” said palaeontologist Terry Gates of the Utah Museum of Natural History and University of Utah.

At the time, its shoreline home was lush, with rivers flowing into a warm, shallow sea, the scientists said.

“It would have been a beautiful time to have been there – very warm, very Mediterranean-like,” Utah Museum of Natural History palaeontologist Scott Sampson said. “But you’ve got to worry about the tyrannosaurs out there.”

The creature’s head is its most remarkable feature. Sitting on the top of its skull is a hollow crest, shaped a bit like the sail of a sailboat.

Velafrons coahuilensis means “sailed forehead from Coahuila.”

Velafrons and other similar duck-billed dinosaurs had nose bones at the top of the head, with their nasal passages greatly lengthened and running through large crests.

Scientists do not know the crest’s function, but think it may have helped attract mates.

Air blown through the crest passages could have made a distinctive trumpeting noise.

The adolescent Velafrons was 25 to 30 feet long, and a full-grown adult would have been 35 feet long, the researchers reported in the Journal of Vertebrate

Palaeontology. That would have put the species around the same size as the Tyrannosaurus rex – though it probably wasn’t as vicious, being a plant eater.

The Velafrons fossils were found in 1995, but it was not until 2002 that scientists – using a jackhammer to get through the hard rock – managed to free the skull from the ground.

Sampson said the remains of a horned dinosaur related to Triceratops were also found, as was evidence that a big meat-eater related to Tyrannosaurus was on the prowl. Many of the dinosaur bones are covered with fossilised snails and clams, indicating these animals lived near the shore.